1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to communicating data and more specifically to a system and method of how a group of devices will divide up responsibilities between call signaling and RTCP synchronizing to reduce the need for conveying media between particular devices via a host device.
2. Introduction
Most video conferencing systems are “all-in-one” devices. These systems often require wired connections between the various components, such as microphones, speakers, monitors, and cameras. In certain cases, recent wireless technologies, such as Wireless HDMI and Wireless USB, allow some of these components to be connected wirelessly. However, these wireless connections are generally fixed between the wirelessly-connected components, and therefore restrict mobility. Moreover, since most devices, such as computers and phones, do not typically have built-in Wireless HDMI or Wireless USB capabilities, they require hardware “dongles” or adapters to provide wireless connectivity with other components. This greatly complicates matters for the user.
Also, current video conferencing systems do not utilize other new and powerful wireless technologies, such as WIFI direct, to integrate different devices or components. Moreover, current solutions fail to use wireless capabilities to provide greater mobility while allowing devices to seamlessly integrate other devices during a conference and automatically extend the conferencing capabilities utilized during the conference. For example, current solutions do not allow an audio-only conferencing device to automatically add video conferencing to an audio conference when the audio-only conferencing device enters the vicinity of a video conferencing device with wireless capabilities. With current solutions, if a user is on an audio-only call through a mobile phone and the user wishes to add high quality video beyond the capabilities of the mobile phone, the user must manually transfer or reestablish the entire call on another device.
In addition to the above issues, there is a a problem of transmitting data between two devices, and make the host device hardware and software simpler. A method to interconnect a host device to its peripherals via a wireless medium is described in related patent application Ser. No. 13/715,130, incorporated herein by reference. The current disclosure simplifies the process of creating a host device by eliminating the cables between the peripherals and the host device. FIGS. 1 and 2 in the '130 application show the host device is required to receive the streams, aggregate them and handle things like “de-lip sync” and so forth.
The requirement of handling so much data requires a load on the host device which might not be applicable on the host device to handle, for instance high bandwidth video, and potentially complex network algorithms (FEC, retransmission, encryption, etc). A classic example is the need to extend a mobile or a table top phone with the ability to receive and transmit video and data.
The current implementations are based on the central manager that collects all the data, the peripherals, camera and microphone, are hardwired connected. The '130 application describes a way to allow the peripherals of the host device to be connected via a wireless medium such as Bluetooth or WiFi to the “host EP” or host external peripheral. The main challenge with this approach was the need to path all the media streams through a single host EP, which centralizes and handles them.
This might restrict in many cases the ability to extend existing low complexity devices such as phones or battery life limited life such as mobile devices or smart phones with high compute or high network throughput media such as video. There are products that use wireless microphones that send the data to the EP were the data is processed, packetized and sent to the network. There are no products that send the data directly to the network. There are products that include a wireless video camera, yet these products are typically complex and include a deployment architecture that requires a centralized device to aggregate their transmission and media.